Cuban Gunboats Attack Refugee Vessel

KEY WEST — Seven Cuban refugees were wounded Saturday when Cuban gunboats raked a hijacked escape vessel with machine-gun fire for four hours as they fled their homeland for Florida.

Andres Sanchez, who was at the helm of the 125-foot Rene Bedia Morales, a state-owned sand carrier, was in critical condition in a hospital near Key West.

He suffered a neck wound when three Cuban patrol boats opened fire on his vessel, which was carrying more than 60 refugees, some of them children, shortly after it had left a harbor near Havana after midnight Saturday.

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jim Rendon said later that the passengers had overpowered the engineer and a deck hand aboard the freighter and forced the vessel to leave Cuba.

The two crewmen asked to return to Cuba and were on their way home late Saturday.

Sanchez's daughter, Laritza Cuesta, 24, told of the horror she and the other refugees faced throughout the night and of the frustration of their military tormentors when they ran out of bullets and began to hurl pieces of wood and scrap metal at the fleeing vessel.

The gunfire continued even after the Rene Bedia Morales had entered international waters 12 miles off Cuba's shore.

"We screamed at them that there were small children aboard the vessel," Cuesta said, looking down at blood from her father's wound that had dried on one of her legs. "Even the children were screaming."

"When my father was hit at the helm, the women and children were brought out of concealment in shelters on the vessel. We wanted to show them there were children aboard, but it made no difference."

The gunboats headed back for Cuba at dawn when a U.S. Coast Guard observation aircraft arrived on the scene, 67 miles southwest of Key West.

Coast Guard helicopters airlifted four of the wounded to the Keys Memorial Hospital.A Coast Guard doctor treated three of the injured aboard one of two Coast Guard cutters that arrived later.

Arturo Cobo, director of the Cuban Transit Center on nearby Stock Island, said the incident was one of many that has been occurring as greater numbers of refugees attempt to cross the rough waters between Cuba and Florida.

"Castro's military has been shooting these people," Cobo said. "It's an international crime. Castro is a pirate. They were in international waters. They don't respect international law."

Some 2,250 of the refugees have reached Florida so far this year, Cobo said; 2,981 made the crossing in 1993. In April this year 685 reached Florida, up from 163 in the same month of 1993.

Officials believe many are killed in storms that overturn their rafts of innertubes bound by rope. Others succumb to the elements or die of thirst before reaching shore.

A "Wall of Sorrow" in Cobo's office contains messages seeking the whereabouts of thousands who have attempted the crossing but never re-established contact after their departure.